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Category Archives: awards

Back in 2012, I self-published a science fiction novella, Adrift on the Sea of Rains. I had expected it to disappear without trace, so I was surprised and delighted when it was nominated for the BSFA Award. And it won!

Then the Hugo shortlists were announced. I wasn’t on any of them. I was disappointed.

But what I did not do was go home and start up a Sad Ian campaign to get myself nominated the following year. Oh, I wouldn’t have framed it as a “get Ian nominated for the Hugo” campaign. I’d have said there weren’t enough self-published works getting nominated: Sad Indies. Or perhaps I’d have complained there weren’t enough Brits on the shortlists, despite the Worldcon taking place in the UK that year: Sad Brits.

And then I would have got a bunch of people who like my fiction, or believed my lies, and persuaded them to nominate me and a few other random members of my clique. But I’d have made sure everyone knew it wasn’t about me or my inability to get nominated. It’s about indie writers! Or, it’s about Brit writers! And if the stats didn’t back up my position, well, I’d just lie, or point fingers at someone popular I could recast as the villain of the piece.

I spent half an hour this morning tallying up the gender balance of the Hugo Award fiction categories since 1959. It doesn’t make for pretty reading. In 1962, 1965, 1966, 1967 and 1971 zero women were nominated. Typically the percentage hovered around 85% male to 15% female, although in 1992, male writers were in the minority for the first time (48% male, 52% female). In 2010, things started to change. The percentage of women on the shortlists doubled to 39%. And in 2011, 2012 and 2013, women outnumbered men.

But then the Sad Larries happened. And last year, the percentage dropped to 62% male and 38% female. And this year, they managed to drop it even further to 80% male and 20% female. And yet they claim they ran their slate to increase diversity! On what planet does more white men on the shortlists than before mean increased diversity?

I’m not really a big fan of popular vote awards, but having been a member of the British Science Fiction Association for over twenty years, and having attended, on and off, the annual Eastecon for around the same period, I’ve usually voted in the BSFA Award. I’ve also found that the shortlists frequently align quite well with my own tastes in the genre – something, obviously, that isn’t all that surprising when you’re a member of the core constituency.

Recent years have seen several changes to the awards. While the categories have finally settled at four – novel, short fiction (ie, any length shorter than novel), non-fiction and art – rules on eligibility have been affected by the advent of the internet and ebooks. Novels have to be published in the UK in the previous calendar year, which is pretty straightforward. Unless – and this is a fairly recent change – they’re ebook-only, in which case, as long as they’re available to UK residents (except the new EU VAT rules on digital products may scupper that from 2015 onwards). Back in the 1990s, short fiction also had to be UK-published, but now there is no such restriction. Likewise for non-fiction and art.

This year, however, a couple of more fundamental changes have been put in place. First, voters can now only nominate four works in each category. Previously, they could nominate as many as they wanted. And novels don’t have to be published in the UK, providing the author is British. The BSFA has also begun crowdsourcing a list of eligible works – although the list could do with some serious curating as there’s a lot of ineligible and duplicated entries on it.

This is all a long-winded way of presenting my own four choices in each category. Which are these:

I really went off short fiction in 2014. Everywhere I looked, the same sort of genre short stories were being published, and it wasn’t a sort I much cared for. As a result, I had to do some last minute reading, which meant some skim-reading of various magazines (I only read one anthology published in 2014 and it was poor; I didn’t buy any published during the year), some clicking through of links on posts of recommendations… and even then I couldn’t actually find four pieces of short fiction I felt were any good. The three listed above were ones that stood out for me during my headlong reading. It’s not the best way to pick something for an award, but then is there a best way?

Paul Kincaid has been an insightful genre critic for a long time, so a collection of his essays gets my first pick, especially since the book contains pieces on many of my favourite genre writers. The Strange Horizons Symposium I thought particularly well done, and I’m surprised it didn’t generate more comment. McCalmont has been writing some really interesting stuff about genre fandom for a while now, but I thought his piece on current short fiction was especially good. Allan is one of my favourite online genre critics, and her extended review, over some twenty posts, of The Mammoth Book of SF Stories by Women was a text-book example of the right way to review a large anthology.

My first choice was an easy pick. That really is a striking piece of cover art. I wasn’t sure whether Hyperluminal counted as art or non-fiction, but it’s a book about art, and I’ve always loved Jim Burns’s art, so I’m putting it here. I then spent one evening last weekend trawling through SF Signal’s forthcoming books posts for inspiration… and both The Gospel of Loki and Wolves jumped out at me. So to speak.

ETA: Apparently, the art award is for “single image” only, which means Hyperluminal is ineligible. So I need to find something else to nominate instead. I’ll update this post when I’ve found something, but for now I’ll Hyperluminal in place even though I’m not nominating it.

It’s that time of year again when the blogosphere is suddenly full of awards eligibility posts. Some people consider them useful and some people think they’re a bad thing. I used to believe there was something a little bit off about them, and I put that down to being, well, British. Blowing your own trumpet and all that. Bad form, you know. But my opinion on them has hardened of late. Having seen what a mockery the Hugo Awards were last year – which is not to say they haven’t been for many, many years – but in 2014 I was more than just an observer on the sidelines…

In 2014, I joined the Worldcon, which allowed me nominate works for the award. I took my vote seriously. I read novels I believed might be award-worthy, so I could put together a reasonably well-informed ballot. But the way everything worked out only brought home to me quite how corrupt is the culture surrounding the Hugos. And part of that culture is the awards eligibility post.

So why are they bad?

For one thing, awards are not about authors – they’re about what readers think of individual works. When an author enters a conversation about their book, they skew the conversation. We’ve all seen it happen. It usually result in authors bullying fans. When an author does the same with awards, they skew the awards.

It’s not a level playing-field. If Author A lists the eligible works they had published in 2014 and a couple of thousand people see that list, and Author B does the same but hundreds of thousands of people see their list… and if 0.01% of those people then nominate a work, guess who’s more likely to appear on the shortlist? Popular vote awards are by definition a popularity contest, so to make it acceptable for those with the loudest voices to shout across the room just makes a mockery of the whole thing.

Awards are fan spaces. Authors should not invade fan spaces. This is not to say that authors are not fans themselves. And there’s no reason why they shouldn’t behave as fans in fan spaces. But an awards eligibility post is an author-thing not a fan-thing. (This leaves posts where authors recommend others’ works in something of a grey area. Big Name Authors have Big Loud Voices, and their endorsement can still skew an award.)

Authors get no say in how their works should be received, and that includes whether it is deserving of an award. (Whatever they might think privately, of course.)

If fans are serious about voting for awards, then they should make an effort to stay informed. They shouldn’t nominate works because they were reminded of that work’s existence by its author. You don’t nominate on a fucking whim. Yes, the field is large, and it’s easy to miss something worthy of an award. But voters have a responsibility to make an informed vote, and while no one expects them to have 100% information – those days are long past – just waiting for their favourite author to provide a list for them to choose from is just plain irresponsible.

And, needing to be reminded of something you consider one of the best pieces of fiction of the year? Seriously? It’s so good, you’ve completely forgotten it a few months later? Awards, as a general rule, are supposed to go to the “best” of something – the Hugo Awards actually include that word in their title. You’d imagine a work which is the best to appear during a year would at least be memorable.

(The above, of course, applies to the nomination process. The actual voting usually settles things out. No matter how bad the shortlist, voters usually pick the right one – as they did last year. But the more shit the shortlist, the more the probability of an unworthy winner approaches one.)

We’re currently in the middle of the BSFA Award nominating period – it closes on 31 January. This year, they’ve changed the rules. Now, we only get four nominations per category, instead of an unlimited number. It’s going to make for a very interesting award. Will the shortlists skew to popularity much more than they have done in the past? Or will they do the opposite… and end up with such a wide spread of nominations that only a handful are required for a work to be shortlisted? I guess we will find out in the months to come…

So they went and announced this year’s Hugo shortlists last Saturday evening, and it was all looking quite good for a bit… and then it turned into a total bag of shite. My dissatisfaction with the Hugos over the past few years has hardly been much of a secret, and I was mentally preparing myself to be disappointed yet again. But for one brief moment there, as the fan categories shortlists appeared, I was actually hopeful. And then…

Three things happened.

First, a bunch of right-wing scumbags campaigned to get some of their right-wing scumbag friends onto various of the shortlists. And they mostly succeeded – of the twelve people on their “ideal ballot”, seven made it onto the shortlists. What they did was perfectly well within the rules, and similar campaigns have taken place in the past – although none have been as successful as this one. Let’s be clear about this, however – this wasn’t because they wanted to see their friends on the shortlists, this was a direct attack on a part of genre fandom. And yes, it’s an attack on the part that exhibits the qualities genre fandom should exhibit – inclusivity instead of misogyny and homophobia, diversity instead of racism and marginalisation, progressiveness instead of regressiveness… you know, the qualities associated with civilised human beings.

Secondly, some bright spark discovered that the entire Wheel of Time was eligible for Best Novel as a single work. And enough people voted for it so it’s made the shortlist. That’s fourteen fat epic fantasy novels which vary in quality from mediocre to rubbish. There’s no denying they’re a notable genre achievement, but a Hugo Award for Best Novel is not the way to recognise that. The series’ presence on the shortlist only makes the award even more of a laughing stock than it already was.

And finally, despite some small victories which reflect the genre and fandom which interest me, the same old names appear, demonstrating little or no progression in the tastes of the bulk of the Hugo electorate. But then, I suppose, it has little to do with taste – and zero to do with “best”. Fandom is now partisan to an extent it never has been before, and becoming increasingly so each year. People nominate their favourite authors, irrespective of whether the work in question is award-worthy – because if you think Neptune’s Brood and Parasite are the best sf novels of last year, you need to read a hell of a lot more widely. There’s a reason they haven’t appeared on any other award shortlist.

The reason all this has taken place – or rather, the reason the shortlists are like this, is because so few people vote in the awards that blocs don’t have to be especially large to have an impact. The only way to prevent this from occurring again is to open the voting to a wider pool. But that won’t happen because the Hugo Award is heavily invested in protecting a model of fandom which hasn’t existed for decades and it has the bureaucracy in place to ensure change is either extremely difficult or impossible.

Given this, I think there are five possible responses:

1. Pretend it’s just a “blip” and treat this year’s awards just the same as other years. It isn’t the same, of course, and it would be either foolish or mendacious to suggest it is. Taking this option would require total blindness to the situation.

2. Vote “no award” in preference to anything by the right-wing scum. This at least would have the benefit of showing the right-wingers exactly what they’re worth. Likewise for the Wheel of Time. Nonetheless, it would still require treating the shortlists seriously – and I think the fiction categories are beyond that.

3. Vote “no award” in preference to everything on the shortlists. Doing this would certainly send a message – the 2013 Hugos were so shit, no awards were given at all. But while that may be true of the fiction categories, it isn’t for some of the others – and it’s unfair that they should also suffer.

4. Vote for the right-wing scum, in the hope they win and destroy what little credibility the Hugos have remaining. Again, like 3., this punishes everybody and not just those who deserve it.

5. Don’t vote, don’t attend the award ceremony; having nothing to do with the Hugos ever again.

According to the Loncon 3 website, 6786 people have purchased attending or supporting memberships for the convention. There will likely be a couple of thousand walk-ins too. Only 1923 people voted in the Hugo awards. The figures look even worse by category – 1595 for novel, 847 for novella, 728 for novelette and 865 for short story. So for best novel, I make that 23.5% of the membership. Over three-quarters of Worldcon members couldn’t give a shit about the Hugo Award for Best Novel. That number has just increased by one. Apologies to the people I know and like on the various ballots – I know it’s unfair on them – but I’ve had it with the Hugos. I will not be voting. Nor will I attend the ceremony. And if I’d been on any of the fiction shortlists, I would have pulled my story.

It goes without saying that my one vote will have zero impact on the final results, whether I choose to exercise it or not. I choose not to. I will do the same next year, even though I am eligible.

Finally, one last request: the Hugo needs to remove the word “world” from its constitution. It is not a world sf award, it is an American one. It should at least have the decency to acknowledge that.

My first thought was that it’s a surprisingly safe shortlist. But then it struck me that with three debuts, “safe” is probably not the right word to use. And yet, in genre terms, in regards to the definition of science fiction with which this year’s jury were apparently working… it is sort of safe. Thankfully, there’s no talking horses (just perambulatory trees), but neither is there the usual left-field literary-fiction-dabbling-in-sf pick.

Unusually, I’ve read four of the books already – and one of them, the Priest, I’d planned to read. Nexus I’d ignored after seeing two negative reviews of it – in Vector and Strange Horizons. But of the books I have read… I thought both the Leckie and the Hurley good, and have written about them – see here and here. It’s also hard not to see Ancillary Justice as the sf book of 2013, given the buzz that’s surrounded it and its appearance so far on the BSFA and Nebula shortlists (and I’ll be very surprised if it doesn’t make the Hugo shortlist as well). Smythe’s The Machine is also very good. And as a literary fiction pick is hardly a contentious choice – while Blue Door describes itself as a publisher of “commercial literary fiction” (an oxymoron, surely?), Smythe has also been published by Harper Voyager, a sf imprint. And The Machine is pleasingly Ballardian.

Then there’s the Mann… I’m a fan of Mann’s sf and I have copies of all his books (see here). But The Disestablishment of Paradise is his first novel since 1996, and a lot has changed since then. Which, sadly, means that The Disestablishment of Paradise feels very old-fashioned. The writing is assured, the structure is handled well, the world-building is clever… but the pace drags, the dialogue is stilted, and the interactions between the characters read like they come from a book written fifty years ago. I’ve not read The Adjacent, although I was planning to as part of my Hugo reading. But Priest is pretty much the Grand Old Man of British literary sf (from the inside, that is), a previous Clarke winner, and a four-time BSFA novel winner (the last in 2012). While The Adjacent‘s presence was by no means a certainty, the odds must have been good it would be there. Finally, all I know about Nexus is what I’ve read in a pair of not-very-complimentary reviews. Which makes its appearance on the list a surprise – but we’ll see what’s said about it now that it’s a finalist.

The Clarke Award has a history of generating odd shortlists. This year’s is perhaps the least contentious for a number of years. But it’s also quite a strong list, with some excellent books on it. Three speak to the future of the genre, two are by old hands, and one updates a 20th Century mode of sf for the 21st Century. That’s a pretty good spread. Who the eventual winner will be, however, is anybody’s guess…

I have spent much of the past half a dozen weeks or so catching up on my Hugo reading so I could round out the draft Hugo ballot I posted back in early February. Obviously, this didn’t mean reading every piece of fiction published in 2013, I had to choose what to read. And I made my choices according to a number of factors – authors I’d read before and appreciated, word of mouth, recommendations from friends and acquaintances, even other people’s posted Hugo ballots… Some novellas and short stories I wanted to read, but didn’t have access to copies since I don’t subscribe to the Big Three and I haven’t bought every original anthology published in 2013.

So there are some things to bear in mind about my choices. First, they’re limited by what I had access to. Second, I’ve nominated some of my my own works because a) I’m allowed to, and b) it’s not like they’ll get hundreds of votes anyway, and c) I wouldn’t have written the damn things if I didn’t think they were good. (And it’s not like I was massively prolific in 2013 anyway – only two novellas and two short stories.)

I should also point out that I don’t actually have much time for the Hugo Awards as awards. The results – or even the shortlists – almost never reflect my tastes, and its winners are by no means the “best” of the year in their categories (and that’s not just a “taste” thing). The Hugos are a popularity contest and I’m not in tune with the electorate in any meaningful way. (Although, to be honest, I’ve been somewhat surprised – and scared – that I noted Sofia Samatar’s ‘Selkie Stories are for Losers’ as a story worth nominating when I first read it back in January 2013, and I seem to be in agreement in that regard with a lot of people as it’s appeared on several award shortlists and Hugo ballots. On the other hand, it does demonstrate my belief that fiction can be objectively good, if so many people with different tastes have recognised Samatar’s story as award-worthy.)

Given my continual dissatisfaction with the Hugos – its categories, its rules, its shortlists and winners throughout the decades and years… – you’d have thought I’d refrain from nominating or voting in this year’s awards. Certainly I see no point in buying a worldcon supporting membership simply for the “privilege” of voting. But I will be attending Loncon 3, and I bought a membership to be at the convention not to vote in the awards. It’s a side… er, well, not “-benefit”; not really a “bonus” either. It’s something I can do because I’ll be attending the worldcon. And, since there are a few points I’d like to make about the Hugo Awards, I decided to make those points this year by nominating works.

There are several books I didn’t manage to read in time which were possible contenders: Shaman, Kim Stanley Robinson; Strange Bodies, Marcel Theroux; The Adjacent, Christopher Priest… And plenty I did read that didn’t make the cut (see here and here). But looking at other people’s posted ballots, I don’t think there are any other books I’ve missed I might consider award-worthy. (Although Larry Nolen did suggest some translated books which looked interesting – can’t find the damn titles now, though…)

I like novellas, I think it’s an interesting length – both to write and to read. But I think it’s best-suited to book format. In other words, it takes up too much real-estate in a magazine, and is too long to read online. But not many small presses publish original novellas in hardback or paperback, and of those that do few of them are the sort of genre fiction that I like. In other words, I read very few novellas published in 2013. So I spent last weekend hunting around online for suitable candidates… without success. I bought only two novellas published last year, and both made my ballot.

Yes, I am ignoring the novelette category. Novelettes should die. There is no need for a category for “medium-length stories”. There is more difference between a 17,500-word novella and a 39,000-word novella than there is between a 1,000-word short story and a 17,400-word short story.

The first test of a good story is: did I make it through to the end? Most I give up on after only a handful of paragraphs. Of the stories I did finish, the above are the ones I thought the best. I note that another story from The Lowest Heaven has proven a more popular pick than mine; and the same is also true for We See a Different Frontier. Both are excellent anthologies, incidentally; and proof that there really needs to be a Best Original Anthology Hugo.

Ah, I hear you cry, your choices make no sense! Red Doc> is fiction, Beyond Apollo is a fanzine, The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot is a dramatic presentation! Except… there is no category for poetry, so I’m putting Red Doc> here. Beyond Apollo is not about science fiction or fantasy or even fandom, it is about science and engineering, so I’m putting it here. The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot is not science fiction, it is about a science fiction programme and set very much in the real world… so I’m putting it here. Paul Graham Raven’s excellent review is about the most traditional item on my ballot. And I’ve given my last slot to the list of 100 Great Science Fiction Stories by Women I published – but which was contributed to by many – because it was an important project.

Yes, I have ignored some of the categories. I will not be voting for them either. Yes, some of my choices are not obvious fits for the categories in which I’ve put them. But I profoundly disagree with the definitions of some of the categories – I mean, “semiprozine”? Who the fuck thinks its definition is even remotely sensible or workable? – and I have chosen to express this disagreement by nominating things where I think they should go.

I expect to be thoroughly disappointed by the eventual shortlists. Perhaps one or two of my fiction choices will make it onto the final ballot – Ancillary Justice is, I think, a shoo-in; likewise the Samatar short story. Nina Allan’s Spin is a possibility. But I’ll be bloody surprised if any of the others make the cut. As for the not-fiction categories… if every nominee for fanzine is a paper fanzine, or every nominee for fan writer is someone who writes for paper fanzines… then I’ll consider fandom officially dead.

Finally, Loncon 3 will also be awarding Retro Hugos, for works published 75 years ago in 1938. So not only are voters expected to be familiar with every piece of genre fiction published last year, but also for a year decades before they were born? Fuck off. Loncon 3 has provided a handy list of what was published in 1938, for those of you daft enough to take the whole thing seriously. I will say only this: I have read only one of the eligible novels, Galactic Patrol by EE ‘Doc’ Smith, and it was unutterably shit… and yet it and its sequels, the Lensman series, are still celebrated today as “classic” science fiction…

There’s an excellent post here by Adam Roberts, written with his characteristic perspicacity and wit, on awards and self-pimping. Now I must hang my head in shame, as I did post a little something of that sort back in December, but in my defence I’m just farting in a thunderstorm. (And Adam himself admits he’d thought The Eye With Which The Universe Beholds Itself was published in 2012, and I wanted to make people aware that it was actually out in 2013. Note to self: do not publish anything in January.) However, I was intending to post something here about what I’d myself nominated for the BSFA (and I will likely do the same for the Hugo), just as soon as I’d figured out what I was going to choose…

Each year, I tell myself I will read more short fiction, or I will read more books during their year of publication. Each year, I fail to do so. So it’s a rare year when I get to actually cobble together a list of nominations in all four BSFA categories – novel, short fiction, non-fiction, artwork – of reasonable length. This year, sadly, is no exception. So, for what it’s worth, these are what I’ve nominated so far…

Novel
Checking back over my records, I see I’ve read nineteen books published in 2013, but only six of them are genre novels. Which doesn’t give me much of a pool to nominate from – but the following are easily the best of those six, and I’d be happy to nominate them even if I’d read ninety books published in 2013.

Short Story
At the start of the year, I made an effort to keep abreast of new genre short fiction as it was published – not just in the various online venues I regularly visit, but also the genre print magazines to which I subscribe – which would be, er, Interzone. Sadly, that effort didn’t last long. I did, however, read two genre anthologies published in 2013, and both contained some very good fiction.

As for the non-fiction and artwork categories… I’ll be spending this weekend trying to cobble together a short list of each to nominate (nominations close on Tuesday 14 January). And I have until 31 March to decide what I’m going to nominate for the 2013 Hugo Awards…